Thanks for your comments.

> Why not at least try to use the DBI introspection APIs to get column information?

I may add that at some point, but many of the DBDs that this will be useful for (DBD::CSV, DBD::XBase, DBD::Excel, etc.) do not provide any useful metadata.

> are you sure that a "SELECT *" will always give you something meaningful in $sth->{NAME} if there are no rows in the table

It works for everything I've tried it on. If it doesn't work, the user just sets it manually.

> I'm not sure defaulting to using the first column as the primary key is a great idea

Well, Class:::DBI itself defaults to first column as primary key :-). I'm just making it explicit.